Frames are the building blocks of a Toufee Pro movie and knowing how to effectively work with frames helps in quickly creating movies and greatly reduce a lot of repetitive work. Toufee Pro Movie Maker has a number of improved features for handling frames that facilitate easy ordering, duplication and managing frame backgrounds/effects. This article will quickly introduce you to creating/duplicating frames and using the Frame Manager how to optimize frames management.

Creating Frames
All Toufee Pro movie have a standard blank frame (with transparent background) to start with. Adding a new frame is quite simple – Select Add New Frame from the Frames menu (Frames -> Add New Frame) or press the Insert key on the keyboard. New frames are always added as the last frame. You can also right-click any frame in the Toufee Movie Maker stage and select the Add New Frame from the popup menu.

One aspect that you might notice is that new frames are always added in the end. Let’s say you have 20 frames in your movie, and you want to quickly insert a frame after your 2nd frame – how do you do this? Frames Manager, which will be covered in a while, is the answer

Duplicating Frames
Creating copies or duplicates of a frame can be very handy in cases when you are doing a presentation-style flash movie where you would like to repeat the headers, footers and common items across all the frames. Click on a frame and select Duplicate This Frame from the Frames menu. You can also select the invoke the same by right-clicking on a frame and selecting the option from the popup menu.

Frames Manager: Integrated Frames Management
The Frames Manager is a new feature of Toufee Pro that simplifies the task of managing frames in your Toufee movie. You can invoke the Frames Manager from the Frames Menu (Frames -> Frames Manager)

As you can see in the above screenshot, you can do most of the frame-related operations from within the Frames Manager window – i.e. creating, reordering and removing frames.

For example, if you would like to add a new frame after Frame 2, simply Frame 2 and click on Add New button. This will create a new frame immediately after the 2nd frame. Selecting any frame and clicking on the Remove button deletes the selected frame.

But the most important function of the Frames Manager is ordering of the frames, a key aspect of frames management. By using the Move Up and Move Down buttons in the Frames Manager window, you can easily arrange the frames in the order that you want them to be. This allows you to quickly juggle frames – you now need have to have to worry about making your movies in the exact order, you can always change frame order if you feel the sequence need to be changed and concentrate on individual frames.

If you are an internet marketer (selling products over the web) then using flash movies created with Toufee would supercharge your marketing efforts many fold. YouTube is a great place to start your internet marketing efforts and for that you need a movie that talks about your product or service. Well, Toufee helps you to easily create flash movies for YouTube, and with the new Toufee 2.0 version, you can directly post your flash movies to YouTube. With flash movies of your product or services in YouTube you can instantly reach a huge target audience. Without Toufee flash movies, imagine creating movies for YouTube – you need to use a whole bunch of tools from PowerPoint to video editing softwares to finish a single movie. Also, with Toufee’s advanced text-to-speech features, you no longer need to spend extra effort to record supporting voices for your movies.

Besides YouTube, there are a number of ways in which you can reach target audience – forums, popular blogs etc. But again, you would face the problem of hundreds or thousands of fellow marketers posting messages onto these forums. So how do you stand out? Instead of text messages, you can use the power of flash movies to effectively deliver your message. You can use a combination of Text, videos (using videos you can deliver product demos, walkthroughs, etc.,) and sound to effectively connect with your target audience. Also, Toufee 2.0 version comes with new and better features that can enhance internet marketing with Toufee flash movies.

Not only does Toufee offer a one-stop solution for internet marketers to create flash movies, it also proves a far better alternative to connect with target audiences in an effective way. Try using Toufee flash movies in your marketing campaigns and you will be amazed with the results.

Till next time
Ganesh

The idea of a discussion platform, something like a flash movie forum for Toufee is something that I have touched upon in quite a few of my old posts. But I seriously think I should address this in more detail and so I write this post.

I was reading this article on a local daily on how Dell started a seperate blog where consumers can suggest what Dell should do; as a result Dell has started selling Linux and that turned out to be quite profitable! You might wonder what connection does it have with Toufee? Well, what we see from the Dell story is that the underlying principle is let the consumers tell us what they want instead. Though we’ve developed Toufee, there are certainly thousands of Toufee users who have used the flash movie maker in ways we couldn’t have imagined and in ways so creative that it made us wonder what one could achieve from this online flash movie maker. That leaves me to think of ways in streamlining the experience of users working with Toufee. A forum is a great way to start, but the team at Toufee is a bit busy with the launch of the new version. So what better option? WIKI! If you know what a Wiki is, you would know what I am going to mean. A wiki site allows anyone to easily create, edit and update a site’s content. The information on a wiki site is always current and everyone can track what others did.

Btw, Toufee already has a fully-functional WIKI site which you can access at the following link http://www.toufee.com/wiki
That’s all that you need to get started to share your views, flash movie making tips, flash movie experiences, general tips on Toufee or whatever there is related to Flash!

Come on people, let’s share what we know and make flash movie making with Toufee better!

Ganesh
Toufee Support

Hi again

This post is about a very basic tip, creating dropshadow effect for texts. Ok, let me get on to the steps rightaway

1. Login to your Toufee account, create a new flash movie project and create a new Text object. Double-click the text object to open up the Properties window. In the Properties window, deselect Frame Background, set Size to any value of your choice (in the example below, I’ve set it to 40) and select a color for your text (I chose white). Once done, click Update to save and close the textbox. You should now have a single text in your movie. I have pasted below the output that I got from my movie that I am using as an example for this post.

2. Now, right-click the text and from the popup menu select Copy This Text option. Right-click on any blank area in the frame and from the popup menu, select Paste Text in Place. Now we have two text objects, but you could see only one as the new text that we just pasted sits exactly on top of the original one. Let’s call the new text object as “Text2″.
3. Simply, double click on the new text (“Text2″) to bring in its Text Properties window. Now, change the font size to 42, change the text color to something that contrasts (I chose black for our example) and click Update to close the dialog box. Now select the text that is on the top (i.e. Text2)  and  click Item Order button found above the movie editor. What this does is that  moves “Text2″ to the back  of our  original text  thereby creating a shadow effect. All done, what do you see now?

Do you see a dropshadow like effect now on your text like the one on the right? The image on the right is the output that I got from Step 3. You will also get a similar output that mimics a dropshadow effect.

You can also playaround a bit by changing the positions of one of the “Text2″ to create variations of dropshadows (like top-right shadow, top-left, bottom-right, etc). Below are some of the dropshadow variations that I did

Hope you find it useful. Leave your comments to this post. See you all next time!

Ganesh

With all the hype surrounding Toufee 2.0 and its release, I thought I’d quickly put through a post on a very useful flash movie tip. In this post, we will see how to speed up the frames and control its timing in your flash movie project. This can be set by using the Unload This Frame option  available in the Advanced Options window. To access this option, follow these steps.

1. Assume that you want slide 1 to have a timing of 4 seconds. Then, right-click the 1st frame on the left pane (all the frames in your project are listed on the left) and from the popup menu select Edit Advanced Frame Properties option. This opens the View Advanced Options dialog box for frame.

2. In the View Advanced Options window, place a checkmark on Unload This Frame feature. This opens up more options, where you will find the option Automatically after X seconds delay. X is a numerical value which represents the number of seconds the frame is displayed before it is unloaded. Repeat the above steps for other frames as well.

CONTROLLING SPEED OF MOVIE OBJECTS

When you unload a frame with x seconds, you need to set the movie objects (i.e. text, images, buttons) in that frame to unload  along with that frame. You can set this by selecting the object and clicking on Properties buttozn (found at the top of the editor). In the Properties window, you will have something called Unload Options. Placing on checkmark on it will open further options where you will have When Frame Unloads Selecting this will unload the movie object along with the frame.

Apple iWeb is a software that allows Mac users to quickly create professional-looking websites without worrying about programming. The nice feature about Apple iWeb is that it comes with great-looking templates for building websites. Once done, Mac users can instantly publish their websites as .Mac sites. However, the one criticism looming large is that iWeb saves the entire website as a single Domain file. Now, this limits Mac users from adding embedded objects into their websites – for example, a YouTube video or a Toufee flash movie. So how do you insert your favorite Toufee flash movie into your Apple iWeb website? Here is what you need to do

1. Open your website (the Domain file) with Apple iWeb
2. Select the File menu, and from the options select Publish to a Folder…

Selecting Publish to a Folder publishes your website as individual HTML pages instead of the single Domain file that you normally end up with. All the HTML pages of your website will now be saved to the Folder that you selected. Use Locator to browse to the folder. You can then use TextEdit to open the HTML page in which you want the Toufee flash movie to go into. Remember that you simply need to copy the HTML code of your Toufee flash movie (you can get this code from the Publish Your Movie window in Toufee) and paste it into the HTML page of your website.

Launch your iWeb website and you’ll now get to see your Toufee flash movie in action!

Hope this helps…should you have any comments please do let me know

 Ganesh

Well, firstly this isn’t a great trick but something that many of you would have actually used in your project without knowing it. Infact, this isn’t completely my thought but that of a Toufee user named Michael Barry who emailed me a couple of days back asking as if he could convert an avi file to flash video file using Toufee. Thats the moment when this though struck…why not use Toufee to convert movie files to flash videos? The process doesn’t even take much time or effort. Toufee supports a plethora of video formats from the old MPEG to the new 3GP and AVI files. The complete list of video files supported by Toufee is as follows - AVI, MOV, FLV, MP4, ASF, M4V, M4A, 3GP, 3G2, MPEG, NSV, RM, WMV. I know a lot of people searching Google hours on end to find a good software that could convert their favourite videos to flash videos so that they can put it up on the internet and share with their friends. Most of those softwares would be a shareware that will allow converting your movie to a fixed time lenght of some x seconds.

So how does Toufee fill up here? Simply upload the video file to Toufee, create a blank movie project, add the video file to your project and viola you’ve just converted your favorite video file to a flash movie! Toufee allows you not only to convert the videos to flash movies but Toufee instantly generates the HTML code that you could use to put the flash movie in your website. Imagine if you were trying to put up a QuickTime movie in your website…not only does that require HTML skills but you need QuickTime plugin installed at each of the machines from which your users would be accessing your site. Now, you cannot guarantee that all your users would have QuickTime installed. With Toufee, you don’t have that problem as all the browsers nowadays have the latest flash plugin installed by default.

With Toufee, the possibilies seems ever increasing and we’ve been discovering new ways to use the free flash movie maker tool to a more broader use. If you found that you have used Toufee in a different way and did something out-of-the-box and if you are willing to share with the users, please email me at ganesh@toufee.com

Till next time,
Ganesh

Toufee flash movie maker is not only good for creating flash movies but can make a great tool for digital storytelling…just have a look at the flash movie created above (you need to wait a bit for the movie to load).

The above flash movie is a great example of how one could use Toufee flash movie maker tool to create digital stories that otherwise would take pages to write about. A noteable feature of this flash movie is the use of split-screen effect. Without the split-screen effect, it would have been difficult to achieve a storybook effect and it would have ended up as just another flash movie. Since flash movies have the ability to have interactive content like images, animations, sounds and videos, it can greatly condense a story into a matter of few slides and that is exactly what the flash movie above has achieved.

This again proves how Toufee seamlessly fits as an educational tool. Authors and book publishers can also use Toufee to create flash movies like the one above to provide sneak preview about their upcoming titles. The possibilities of what one could do with Toufee seams endless. Do let us know if you have used Toufee to create digital stories or if you had used Toufee to create something completely out-of-the-box.

Till next post,

Ganesh

Did you know you can customize your Toufee buttons to add special links? Let say you have a button called Email Me in your Toufee flash movie. Now, when users click the button, won’t it be great if by default it opens the email program with the your address in the To field? Marketers would find this handy as it would also mean that they get instant feedback on their product (assuming that they use Toufee flash movies to create flash promo).

So how do you actually do it? Very simple, indeed. Select the button for which you want to create the hyperlink, and open its Properties. In the Properties window, you’ll find Go To URL textbox under the Button Action option. In the textbox, enter mailto: followed by our email address…for example, mailto:ganesh@toufee.com. Update the changes and close the window. Now when you play the movie, you’ll notice that on clicking the button, your default email client will open. This feature is really useful if you at the end of the flash movie you want users to post their feedback.

Customization feature is not limited to only adding your email address. You can also link your button to open up Skype or MSN applications. For example, at the end of your flash movie you could add a button “Skype Me” which on clicking will allow users to reach you through Skype. For this, you need to enter in the button URL as skype:phone followed by the Skype phone number. You can also use the same format to launch MSN messenger as well, just use msn:yourid (for example, msn:ganesh@hotmail.com)

Should you have any queries related to this article, please feel free to email at help@toufee.com

Till next time!

Ganesh